Australian Chamber Orchestra International Associate Ensemble at Milton Court

3–5 Oct 2019

Australian Chamber OrchestraRichard Tognetti director & violin

Part of Barbican Presents 2019–20

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Please do ...

Turn off watch alarms and phones during the performance.

Please don’t ...

Take photos or make recordings during the performance.

Use a hearing aid?

Please use our induction loop – just switch your hearing aid to T setting on entering the hall.

Programme produced by Harriet Smith; advertising by Cabbell (tel 020 3603 7930)

The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

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Australian Chamber Orchestra International Associate Ensemble at Milton Court

Thu 3 Oct

7.30pm, Milton Court Concert HallGoldberg Variations

Stravinsky Three Pieces for string quartet Thomas Adès The Four Quarters – NightfallsJ S Bach, arr Richard Tognetti 14 Canons on a Goldberg Ground, BWV1087 interval 20 minutes J S Bach, arr Bernard Labadie Goldberg Variations, BWV988

Australian Chamber OrchestraRichard Tognetti director & violin Erin Helyard keyboards

Fri 4 Oct

7.30pm, Milton Court Concert HallLuminous

Music from Britten and Janácek to R.E.M. and Peteris Vasks

Australian Chamber OrchestraRichard Tognetti director & violin Bill Henson photography, cinematography & editingLior vocals

Sat 5 Oct

7.30pm, Milton Court Concert HallThe lark ascending

Pe- teris Vasks, arr Stefan Vanselow Viatore for 11 solo strings Britten Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridgeinterval 20 minutes Vaughan Williams The lark ascendingSchoenberg Verklärte Nacht

Australian Chamber OrchestraRichard Tognetti director & violinGuildhall Chamber Orchestra

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Welcome to this residency featuring our International Associate Ensemble at Milton Court, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and its brilliantly innovative director Richard Tognetti.

They excel at putting together programmes and projects that allow us to experience music afresh and nowhere is that more vividly illustrated than in the first programme, performed last night, in which one of the most iconic works in the repertoire – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – was presented in a new light, not least because we were hearing it in the orchestral arrangement by the great Canadian Baroque specialist Bernard Labadie. Prior to this, we had an ear-tingling array of pieces, beginning with Stravinsky immediately post-The Rite and continuing with a movement from Thomas Adès’s string quartet The Four Quarters, which, like the Goldbergs, is concerned with the passing of time, and night-time in particular. After this came one of Tognetti’s own arrangements – again closely related to the Goldbergs.

During last season’s residency the ACO presented one of its mesmerising audio-visual experiences – Mountain; tonight the ACO and Tognetti join forces with legendary Australian photographer and cinematographer Bill Henson for Luminous, with a soundtrack ranging from Purcell and Schnittke to R.E.M.

For the final concert, the ACO and Tognetti are joined by the Guildhall Chamber Orchestra, in a follow-up to the highly successful collaborations of 2017 and 2018. Again, the repertoire is typically wide-ranging, from the pastoral ethereality of Vaughan Williams’s The lark ascending, via the decadent harmonies of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, to Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations; the concert begins in contemplative mood with Peteris Vasks’s Viatore.

I hope you enjoy the residency.

Huw HumphreysHead of Music

Welcome

ACO UK

ACO UK is an independent, charitable company which supports the activities of the Australian Chamber Orchestra in the United Kingdom and provides opportunities for the British public to experience and engage with the ACO.

The ACO gratefully acknowledges its ACO UK Friends and members of its Chairman’s Council for their support of these performances.

ACO UK Directors

John Taberner ChairProfessor Edward Byrne ac

Richard EvansAlison HarbertRebecca HossackKathy LetteSony LeydeckerThe Rt Hon the Baroness Liddell of CoatdykeDamian Walsh

ACO UK Friends

AmbassadorsStephen Fitzgerald ao & Julie FitzgeraldPatronsJohn & Kate Corcoran John ColesFriendsPatricia Thomas Helen Liddell

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The industrial and cityscape backdrops of Bill Henson’s

imagery serve as Healy’s sonic inspiration ... ‘I have laced these

environmental sounds with distant fragments of the musical phrases and human voice, both whispers

and singing.’Paul Healy

Bill Henson: Untitled, 2000–2001

courtesy of the artist,

Tolarno Galleries and

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

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Friday 4 October 7.30pm Milton Court Concert Hall LuminousPaul Healy Sound Sculpture

Alfred Schnittke (1934–98), arr Yuri Bashmet (born 1953) Trio Sonata – 2 Adagio

Benjamin Britten (1913–76), arr Richard Tognetti (born 1965) Corpus Christi Carol

Schnittke, arr Bashmet Trio Sonata – 1 Moderato

Gabriel Yared (born 1949), arr Tognetti The Talented Mr Ripley – Lullaby for Cain

R.E.M., arr Tognetti I’ve Been High

Paul Healy Sound Sculpture

Henry Purcell (1659–95) King Arthur – What power art thou?

interval: 20 minutes

Paul Healy Sound Sculpture

Peteris Vasks (born 1946) Concerto for Violin and Strings, ‘Distant Light’

Leoš Janácek (1854–1928), arr Jarmil Burghauser (1921–97) On an Overgrown Path – Good night!

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Richard Tognetti director & violin

Bill Henson photography, cinematography & editing

Lior vocals

6Two Worlds, Standing Together and ApartPeter Craven talks to Richard Tognetti and Bill Henson

When presented 10 years ago in Sydney Luminous had an eerie majesty and its revamp suggests as rich and strange a thing for the ear and the eye and whatever lies between.

A couple of Italianate boys, Caravaggio runaways, one somewhat older than the other, fiddle at something. A girl is poised in expectation, not apprehension exactly, at God knows what. Youth scampers sensuously, is sodden, begrimed. A sunset flames in a luminescent radiance of orange and gold. A wind blows sideways through a greyer, paler landscape: is it edging towards rain, or dusk?

That’s Henson, and he’s there to abide with and sometimes eliminate himself to blackness or blankness alongside such things as Tognetti on violin, soaring, maybe stupefying, as he does with Peteris Vasks’s Violin Concerto with its revolutions and comings together and further sunderings. This darkness is there, together with the Adagio from Schnittke’s Trio Sonata, to indicate or inflect the tradition out of which he comes, but also sits alongside that air from Purcell, ‘What power art thou?’, sung by the contemporary singer Lior (though Henson likes to remember the phrasing of the countertenor Andreas Scholl). Is Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol included to indicate the lines on which the British genius sees the development of song? Is Janácek there for the greater reverberation of the Slavs? In any case, it’s a modern programme, partly a Modernist one, and Henson is there with his high and moody literary amplitude of manner and momentum, as if life were forever recapitulating a novel of Thomas Mann in which the Lido beckons like the mouth of death and the mountain is marvellous because disease is something to be meditated on and the drum of war is over the hills but not far away.

Tognetti knows what he’s doing, with Henson looking like a presence commensurate with the vision of the music. And Tognetti is also histrionically, vibrantly, a man of style and a showman of classical beauty. ‘We have to get back to beauty,’ he says, as if we’d ever left it. The insinuation with Henson in concert is to

deepen the conviction that art, whichever and whatever way it happens to express itself, is the biggest kind of deal, not a mere shuffle or an indulgence of taste. I asked Tognetti what made him look for a visual artist and how he sees the history of the visual-cum-musical.

‘There was Scriabin. And then movies come along, and a whole stream of synaesthesia, of music and colour, and a sort of abstracted vision took a back seat for many years. People got swept away by the moving image. And we were looking at working with artists … It had to be silent and it had to be a deeper prelude – a forepath to music. I think it was Jan Minchin who said that what would be perfect would be Bill.’

Tognetti talks of the friendship that came from being thrust together to come up with the idea. ‘Bill started immediately talking about music and I realised he had a profound knowledge of the subject. I’d go as far as to say his work, most of his work, is informed by his hankering for the abstracted and emotional quality of pure music. Sometimes it’s just one phrase of a piece of music that he can recall and it stays there for him as a sort of dream.’

Here, Tognetti cites the writer David Malouf, saying that with certain elements of art you want them, at one extremity, to stay mysterious. As Malouf put it: ‘I don’t want to know how it’s done. I need the magic to keep it believable.’ On this, Tognetti says: ‘And so Bill, although he’s sophisticated, can sometimes talk with an autodidactic passion: you know, he’ll say, “This is the best art”.’

Tognetti has a deep respect for Henson’s feeling for music and is profoundly moved by his reaction to things. But why does Tognetti need the images – Bill Henson’s or anyone else’s? Doesn’t music have its own aesthetic autonomy? ‘An excellent, necessary question,’ he says, gathering breath. ‘It’s a fine arc of inspiration. Just in terms of art, we are in such deft hands with Bill. One very important thing is that very early on Bill said, ”If the vision will bring the music down then the image should be black, so when the music is such that the images distract from that pure abstract emotion we go black”.’

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noteFor Bill Henson, it has always been a solitary

activity, a hermit-in-the-wilderness thing, being the kind of photographer he is. To talk to Henson even in the context of a show such as Luminous is always to enter that thoughtful, introspective space from which he makes his work. Henson is not a photographer’s photographer: photography is for him a window on a world in which every light shines, every darkness dazzles – and you can hear how his sense of the aesthetic – his sense of music, literature, drama – coheres.

‘The thing about objects,’ he says, ‘– and I make objects – is that they’re not a time-based thing. Music is time-based – it’s like the cinema, or theatre. When you look into it, in their highest state they seem almost to attain a stillness so that a great moment in the cinema feels as though it’s still. This is true of literature, too, and the words of literature. It’s as if they’re no longer just symbols of something, they’re objects. And so the power of objects is very important, but they rely on stillness and silence for that power. It’s not like music at all. And it’s what you need for contemplation – stillness and silence. So there’s a lot of power there, but it’s different. That’s why I’m not with Walter Pater at all in his belief that art strives for the condition of music.’

So we’re getting a denial of the art for art’s sake doctrine as a way of defining the nature of the relationship between a photographer, who is sometimes thought of as having the ambitions of a painter, attempting to clarify the nature of what he does, and the music of a musician with whom he’s working.

Suddenly, unpredictably, Henson introduces the idea of painting at its grandest and he does so in terms of depth of life, of truth, the highest moral claim for art.

‘If I’m standing in front of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son I get the sense of the lumpy paint in this very large, late work, which is at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. The paint is the physical manifestation of pathos. It’s like you could pick a bit of pathos off the surface of the painting. It’s quite incredible. And, you know, the way we relate to photographs is entirely different from the way we relate to paintings. That’s true of music and pictures, as well. But

there’s a way in which you can have a dialogue between these two. And the way you do that is to use both methods all the time: what happens is that you give each medium the ideal amount of space. That was the key to making this project with Richard work.’

He talks about meeting Tognetti back in 2005, and how they played each other the famous Haydn symphonies and generally got on like a house on fire. Then, after a veritable sea of examples, he explains the central principle of their collaboration.

‘The whole point of the enterprise is that you don’t want the music to illustrate the pictures and you don’t want the pictures to illustrate the music. A mistake most people make when they do these collaborative things is that they don’t give the music the space it needs. So I’m producing all these great big stretches of blackness where there is nothing on the screen, because it can’t work when Richard is doing an energetic cadenza on his violin. I’m not going to have something struggling away in the background on the screen. But when there are passages in the music where it’s coming and going and asking for silence, you know, that’s when the images should occupy the space and you just have to understand how the ebb and flow works.’

He has thought about the whole principle of how, in practice, independence, collocation, separateness can work. ‘You have to get rid of all that stuff, so that they don’t echo each other. They almost seem like two parallel universes, but somehow the sum is greater than the parts, and it’s got a lot to do with understanding how to introduce space into the whole thing so that you’re not being trapped in a kind of lift for the weekend with two art forms in conflict.’

His sense of how to allow each form a parallel integrity involved the most elaborate process of filming the pictures and soundtracking the process of the music’s interplay and the isolation of them. The upshot, in Henson’s description of how he set about shaping and effectively choreographing Luminous – by shooting the image in relation to the presence and withdrawal of the music – is extraordinary in the telling, just as it is extraordinary in the stasis and movement of Luminous.

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10One of the abiding fascinations with Bill Henson is the way he muses on something about which he is confident intellectually and practically. He knows Luminous and he likes it, and he knows exactly what he’s doing with it, though there is always with him a sense of mystery too.

When Henson is asked to comment on Tognetti’s beauty line, he responds: ‘I can’t see that it’s been anywhere but at the centre of the most compelling and interesting things that have been written’.

He adds, not at all dismissively, just by way of distinction, that the compositional mind and the performing one are different beasts. ‘I say to Richard, “You’re in a performative headspace. I’m just dreaming my dreamy dreams, as they say in Monty Python.” There’s a necessary and absolute disconnectedness between someone who’s composing and someone who’s performing. If I were to say anything apposite then it would be the thing Bob Hughes popularised, that meaning comes from feeling. It is hard for people to allow themselves to feel something without analysing it and justifying it and giving it a political dimension. That’s a great pity.’

With Henson there’s always a sense of the shock and scandal of art, which comes at the furthest extreme not from moral power but from moral attitude. His way of articulating this leads him from Looney Tunes to his beloved Thomas Mann at his most apparently decadent.

‘This is where you reclaim your “poisonal space”, as Bugs Bunny would say. Remember how in Death in Venice Aschenbach gets into the lift for the first time. He looks up and there’s Tadzio standing right in front of him and it’s the first time he’s been close to the boy and he notices he has jagged bluish teeth of the kind that chlorotic people have, and he muses to himself that this beautiful creature will not live to grow old and it gives Aschenbach a twinge of pleasure which he chooses not to investigate. You can just choose to go in this direction or that direction. But, of course, that would be seen as a very ambiguous turn.’

‘I can explain it and the process,’ Henson says. ‘Once we decided on the music for the programmes 10 years ago, I got my hands on some recordings and put them on my stereo, in my studio, and I had a movie camera sitting on a tripod, with one of those fluid heads that makes it move very slowly and smoothly. And I had the photographs that I was interested in put together with these pieces of music. What I then did was play the music in my studio, turned on the microphone on the moving camera so as to record whatever was going on. It picked up the music and also my spoken work next to the camera. I would move the camera down across the image and at a certain point would seesaw the camera up and down gently, where the music was doing something that made me think that was how the image should move.

‘So I had all these tapes from the camera which formed the final imagery that would then be digitised and put up on the screen with all my spoken instructions. But all the images were accompanied by the music at exactly the point where I was doing things with the camera or in response to the music or in anticipation of something, whether the silence or the noise. And you’d see the way the camera stuttered slightly and then it started to pull back – it was zooming out of this thing, it was drifting off, and that’s exactly where that goes because you would hear the music the ACO had to play at that second. And so we put together a digital tape with all of this stuff including the black spaces.’

It was the weirdest and most elaborate system for co-ordinating word and image imaginable and it offered the ACO both the key to a remarkable show and a necessary tour de force of co-ordinated playing.

‘And the orchestra had this big challenge,’ Henson says, ‘which was to play to the tape, so they had to begin and do the things they did as musicians at exactly the right time in order for the images to work in tandem. It was about turning these two universes into parallel ones which reflected each other but didn’t illustrate each other.’

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noteA beautiful cohesion

Kate Holden speaks to singer-songwriter Lior

The voice is sweet and unstrained: the voice of a relaxed man. It comes from his youthful face effortlessly, although his brow creases with feeling, and it arrives in the ear as kindly as if someone were conveying good news.

For the past 15 years Lior Attar has been singing his own music, since the success of his debut album Autumn Flow. That body of intimate, thoughtful missives from the gentler side of pop balladry, independently produced and fully realised, brought Lior to the public in his late twenties after a long, modest preparation for singer-songwriting. ‘I spent my later teenage years in bands, learning the craft and how to communicate with other musicians. I always say,’ he starts to laugh, ‘I’m just so fortunate that YouTube wasn’t around when I was a beginner. For me to have artistic control was most important. I built up to it and by the time I put out a whole album it was a body of work I was really proud of. I never thought it would have any success commercially so I thought, at least I can do something I can be proud of for the rest of my life.’ Since the surprise of national success in 2005, he has released six albums of his own material, is a multi-ARIA-award-winner and has toured internationally.

With songs about love, relationships and his own maturing, the tenderness of his voice expresses the candour of his art. ‘You think, my work’s probably always going to be a private little thing that I do for myself, and maybe a few people will like it and hear it, and suddenly it’s part of the public arena: it’s kind of weird. Especially when you think that that’s never going to be you. There’s a beautiful transfer of ownership,’ he confides. ‘You write a song and it’s yours; and then someone tells you it’s theirs. That’s the greatest compliment really.’ Indeed, his This Old Love is a favourite for weddings and crooned by the lovelorn; both fans and fellow musicians cherish his melodies, his lyrics and his unassuming troubadour demeanour.

But Lior has worked his vocal range down some demanding byways. ‘I look at it like a kind of

For Henson, one suspects, it’s a violation of the holiness of the heart’s affections to walk away from ambivalence. Then he takes a shot at anyone who would disagree with him about this. It could hardly be more deadly or more self-assured. ‘It’s the lowest rung on art’s ladder to heaven, politics,’ he says.

It’s natural to return to Tognetti. He’s hyper-conscious, he says, of Henson as ‘a king of chiaroscuro’ and his selections for Luminous tally with this: the darkness of the Schnittke and then the radiant transition to the lightness of Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol, which was massively popularised by Jeff Buckley in his Hallelujah mode. And Lior has precisely the sort of supple, popular voice to carry this bit of crossover from darkness into light. Then back into the dark with Schnittke to emerge into Gabriel Yared’s ‘Lullaby for Cain’, forever associated with Sinéad O’Connor singing one of the great, arty post-Dylan songs, again with Lior. Then I’ve Been High from R.E.M., a song that thrilled Tognetti when he heard it performed on The Panel years ago. And then, by way of another contrast, Purcell at his most dramatic and plangent with Lior singing ‘What power art thou?’ from King Arthur.

After the interval, ‘Distant Light’, the Concerto for Violin and Strings by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, allows the ACO its maximum range of coloration and impassioned tenebrous power, with Tognetti as soloist and Henson summoning up a wilderness of worlds of dark and light.

Luminous ends with ‘Good night!’, the seventh of Janácek’s cycle On an Overgrown Path, adapted for strings. ‘It was originally written for piano,’ Tognetti says, ‘but it is his equivalent to one of Schubert’s song-cycles.’

So with the prospect of such dramatic variation and overriding unity there is just the invitation Luminous presents: two art forms, two worlds, standing together and standing apart.

Programme note © Peter Craven

12straight line: the core of me is a singer-songwriter, then I branch off to do musical collaborations as side projects. One reason is to satisfy other aspects of my musical curiosity, that perhaps don’t have a place in my singer-songwriter world. And being a solo artist is by its nature solitary. I enjoy the collaborative element of working with people such Nigel Westlake and Paul Grabowsky, with whom I’ve embarked on major collaborations over the past few years.’

It was in 2013 that the Compassion symphonic song-cycle – composed with Westlake, ‘one of the most beautiful and humble human beings I’ve ever met’ but a man in mourning following the death of his son – was first performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. Drawing on Lior’s Israeli heritage and devised to braid Hebrew and Arabic poetry, its central hymn, ‘Avinu Malkeinu’, is a showstopper, that sweet voice growing in power to a stupendous clarion crescendo, declaring that compassion is the way to liberation. Lior sat in shirtsleeves, acoustic guitar in hand, on a concert hall stage among an orchestra for the first of what has proved to be many times, as the work has toured Australia and the United States. It won the 2014 ARIA Award for Best Classical Album.

Since then he has collaborated with shadow puppet artists, appearing again at the Sydney Opera House; performed as Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre; and written the score for a play about Charles Darwin, The Wider Earth. In 2017 he collaborated with vocal group The Idea of North and composer Elena Kats-Chernin on an album for the HUSH Foundation, which records music for hospitalised children. He has worked with the Bangarra Dance Company, the Australian

Youth Orchestra and, earlier this year, with Paul Grabowsky as part of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. And, of course, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

With this history of genre-leaping, he is an apt choice for a programme that includes an indie pop song and a Baroque icon. For Lior himself, his encounters with classical music have brought him to a repertoire he might not have discovered: he knew the Britten carol but not the Purcell piece. He is a long-time admirer of the ACO, however, and was thrilled when the orchestra expressed an interest in having him as a guest. ‘The ACO is incredible and held in such high esteem,’ he says. ‘I’ve wanted to work with it and collaborate with it for quite a while now. You feel the dedication and perseverance in its performance.’ Likewise, he is a lover of Bill Henson’s work, and says the visual half of the Luminous concept was another lure. Appearing in the programme for four works, which spans a ‘lullaby’ originally performed by Sinéad O’Connor and another usually sung by a baritone, he happily anticipates pushing his voice further, giving breath to new emotions. ‘I’m looking forward to working with Richard and the orchestra to play around and work out where the pitch is in the range in order to strike the greatest emotional resonance.’

After years of work with orchestras, he muses on the elements that go into creating what he calls ‘a beautiful cohesion’. He says, ‘You don’t realise that when you’re on the other side: the intricacies and intimate workings of an orchestra. So when there’s that moment, when you know, something in you rises and you feel it happening around you, that beautiful magical moment – when that happens, it’s like a miracle. How did all those things happen?’

Programme note © Kate Holden

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xtsBenjamin Britten (1913–76)

Corpus Christi CarolHe bare him up, he bare him down,He bare him into an orchard brown.Lully, lullay, lully, lullayThe falcon hath borne my make away.

In that orchard there was an hallThat was hangèd with purple and pall.And in that hall there was a bed,It was hangèd with gold so red.Lully, lullay …

In that bed there lieth a knight,His woundès bleeding, day and night.By that bedside kneeleth a mayAnd she weepeth both night and day.Lully, lullay …

And by that bedside there standeth a stone,Corpus Christi written thereon.

Traditional

Gabriel Yared (born 1949)The Talented Mr Ripley – Lullaby for CainFrom the silence, from the nightComes a distant lullaby.Cry, remember that first cry,Your brother standing byand loved, both loved,Beloved sons of mine.

Sing a lullaby,mother is close by.Innocent eyes, such innocent eyes.

Envy stole your brother’s life,came home, murdered peace of mind.Left you nightmares on the pillow,Sleep now.

Soul, surrendering your soul,the heart of you not wholefor love, but love,what toll?

Cast into the dark,Branded with the markof shame, of Cain.

From the garden of God’s lightto a wilderness of night.Sleep now, sleep now.

Text © estate of Anthony Minghella

R.E.M.I’ve Been HighHave you seen? Have not, will travel.Have I missed the big reveal?Do my eyes, do my eyes seem empty?I’ve forgotten how this feels.

I’ve been highI’ve climbed so highBut life sometimes it washes over me.

Have you been? Have done, will travel.I fell down on my knees.Was I wrong? I don’t know, don’t answer.I just needed to believe.

I’ve been high, etc.

So I dive into a pool so cool and deepThat if I sink I sink and when I swim I flySo high …

What I want, what I really want isJust to live my life on high.And I know – I know you want the sameI can see it in your eyes.

I’ve been high, etc.

Close my eyes so I can seeMake my make-believe believe in me.

Words and music © Peter Lawrence Buck, Michael Mills and Michael Stipe

Henry Purcell (1659–95)King Arthur – What power art thou?What power art thouWho from belowHast made me riseUnwillingly and slowFrom beds of everlasting snow!See’st thou not how stiff,And wondrous old,Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,I can scarcely moveOr draw my breath,I can scarcely moveOr draw my breath.

Let me, let me,Let me, let me,Freeze again …Let me, let me,Freeze again to death!

John Dryden (1631–1700)

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About the performers

Richard Tognetti director & violin

Richard Tognetti is Artistic Director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has established an international reputation for his compelling performances and artistic individualism.

He began his studies in his hometown of Wollongong with William Primrose, then continued with Alice Waten at the Sydney Conservatorium, and Igor Ozim at the Bern Conservatory, where he was awarded the Tschumi Prize as the top graduate soloist in 1989. Later that year he led several performances of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and that November was appointed as the Orchestra’s lead violin and, subsequently, Artistic Director. He created the Huntington Festival in Mudgee, New South Wales, and was Artistic Director of the Festival Maribor in Slovenia from 2008 to 2015.

He performs on period, modern and electric instruments and his numerous arrangements, compositions and transcriptions have expanded the chamber orchestra repertoire and been performed throughout the world. As director and/or soloist, he has appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras and in 2016 was the Barbican Centre’s first Artist-in-Residence at Milton Court Concert Hall. He has also composed for numerous film soundtracks, including the ACO’s documentary films Mountain, The Reef and Musica Surfica.

Richard Tognetti

Richard Tognetti was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2010. He holds honorary doctorates from three Australian universities and was made a National Living Treasure in 1999. He performs on the 1743 ‘Carrodus’ Guarneri del Gesù violin, lent to him by an anonymous Australian private benefactor.

Bill Henson photography, cinematography & editing

Bill Henson is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Born in Melbourne in 1955, he had his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975. He has since exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, in cities including New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Montreal, Barcelona, Vienna and Amsterdam. In 1995 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, with his celebrated series of cut-screen photographs. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales.

In 2003 his work appeared in Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography, New York and he had a solo exhibition at the Centro de Fotografía, University of Salamanca. In 2005 a comprehensive survey of his work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Victoria. This landmark event attracted record visitor numbers for a contemporary art exhibition in Australia. In 2006 he exhibited a

Bill Henson

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major body of work in Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Bill Henson’s work is to be found in every major public collection in Australia. International collections include the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst and Sammlung Volpinum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Lior vocals

Lior is one of Australia’s most admired singer-songwriters, renowned for his beautiful voice and songs that radiate truth and sincerity. His breakthrough came in 2005 with the release of his debut album Autumn Flow, which has become one of the most successful independent debut releases in Australian music history. He has since released a further six albums and has toured extensively both in Australia and internationally. He is a multi-ARIA Award winner as well as an APRA Screen Award winner for his songwriting work for film and television.

In 2014 Lior collaborated with Nigel Westlake on a symphonic song-cycle for voice and orchestra called Compassion. The work consists of original orchestrations which set ancient texts

in both Hebrew and Arabic centred around the wisdom of compassion. Lior and Westlake toured Australia with Compassion, performing with the major state orchestras and winning an ARIA for Best Classical Album in 2014. In 2016 Lior premiered Compassion in the USA with the Austin Symphony Orchestra and went on to win the Austin Table Critics’ Award for Best Symphonic Performance.

Australian Chamber Orchestra

The Australian Chamber Orchestra lives and breathes music, making waves around the world for its combination of explosive performances and brave interpretations. The ACO’s programmes are steeped in history but always looking to the future, juxtaposing celebrated classics with new commissions, and adventurous cross-artform collaborations.

Since 1990 it has been led by Artistic Director Richard Tognetti and together they give more than 100 concerts across Australia each year. Whether performing in Manhattan, New York, or Wollongong, New South Wales, the ACO is unwavering in its commitment to creating transformative musical experiences.

Last season the ACO began a three-year London residency as International Associate Ensemble at Milton Court in partnership with the Barbican Centre, with which they share a commitment to present concerts that inspire, embolden and challenge audiences.

The Orchestra regularly collaborates with artists and musicians who share its ideology: from instrumentalists, vocalists and cabaret performers, to visual artists and film makers.

In addition to its national and international touring schedule, the ACO has an active recording programme across CD, vinyl and digital formats. Recent releases include Water | Night Music, the first Australian-produced classical vinyl for two decades, and the soundtrack to the acclaimed cinematic collaboration Mountain.

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Australian Chamber Orchestra

Artistic Director/ Lead ViolinRichard Tognetti Chair sponsored by Wendy Edwards, Peter & Ruth McMullin, Louise Myer & Martyn Myer ao, Andrew & Andrea Roberts

Violin Helena Rathbone * Chair sponsored by Kate & Daryl Dixon

Satu Vänskä *Chair sponsored by Kay Bryan

Glenn ChristensenChair sponsored by Terry Campbell ao & Christine Campbell

Aiko GotoChair sponsored by Anthony & Sharon Lee Foundation

Mark IngwersenChair sponsored by Prof Judyth Sachs & Julie Steiner

Ilya IsakovichChair sponsored by Meg & Cambell Meldrum

Liisa Pallandi Chair sponsored by The Melbourne Medical Syndicate

Maja SavnikChair sponsored by Alenka Tindale

Ike SeeChair sponsored by Di Jameson

Viola Ida Bryhn #Chair sponsored by peckvonhartel architects:Robert Peck am, Yvonne von Hartel am, Rachel Peck & Marten Peck

Nicole Divall Chair sponsored by Ian Lansdown

Elizabeth WoolnoughChair sponsored by Philip Bacon am

Nathan Greentree

Cello Timo-Veikko Valve *Chair sponsored by Peter Weiss ao

Melissa BarnardChair sponsored by Dr & Mrs J Wenderoth

Julian ThompsonChair sponsored by The Grist & Stewart Families

Double Bass Maxime Bibeau * Chair sponsored by Darin Cooper Foundation

* principal# guest principal

The list of players was correct at the time of going to press

Touring TeamManaging DirectorRichard Evans

Chief Operating OfficerAlexandra Cameron-Fraser

Tour ManagerLisa Mullineux

Assistant Tour ManagerTom Farmer

Artistic AdministratorAnna Melville

Sound EngineerBob Scott

Multimedia ProducerJoseph Nizeti